For that last year, Dr. Aly Cohen has joined the Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program (MSMP) as an Instructor of Shelter Medicine. However, many don’t know that she moonlights as a zoo vet for one of our region’s zoological parks!
Cohen started with the MSMP at Cornell in 2020, after working with MSMP’s 2019 Spayathon trip to Puerto Rico. She is instrumental when it comes to teaching interns and students, both at the SPCA of Tompkins County and on Cornell’s campus. A native of New Jersey, Cohen first found her way to upstate NY when she attended Binghamton University for her undergraduate education. Following that, Cohen went to vet school at Ross University and then completed her clinical year at Purdue University. It was at Purdue that Cohen was exposed to high quality, high volume spay and neuter (HQHVSN) surgery, which remains one of her favorite aspects of non-profit practice.
Upon completing her medical training, Cohen returned to Binghamton to work at a nonprofit animal hospital/cat sanctuary for six years. While there, she discovered an opening for a veterinarian at the Binghamton Zoo. Cohen had always considered working with zoo and wildlife while in vet school and even traveled to South Africa to complete an externship. She applied for the position and the rest is history. She says, “I feel very lucky because it’s very competitive to get a zoo position.”
Cohen says the biggest similarity between zoo and shelter medicine is the population medicine aspect: managing infectious diseases, protocol development, and preventative medicine are essential to these practices, and common in both settings.
Cohen adds, “most important, from my point of view, is behavior and enrichment. A lot of what we do at the zoo is making sure the animals are exhibiting their natural behaviors and that they’re getting stimulated with varying enrichment– that’s sensory or food related, or smell related for target training. To get them to accept a vaccine or so that we can examine their belly. We have a red panda that we taught to stand up on a perch so I can ultrasound her belly for pregnancy checks. That I think this parallels pretty well to shelter because we’re doing counter conditioning in the shelter to get a dog used to wearing a leash or used to people walking by without barking.”
Another similarity can be the surgeries that are performed. “Small animal mammal things translate really well. I’ve done entropion surgery on a snow leopard, which is something that we do all the time on cats in the shelter. People often ask, ‘how did you know what to do?’ Truth is, it’s the same; it’s just a big cat,” says Cohen.
While it is no small feat maneuvering two very different realms of veterinary medicine and two completely different locations, Dr. Cohen makes it seem effortless. At the end of the day, she is helping to improve the lives of animals both big and small, all across the Finger Lakes region.
